Visual Smarts

His Vast Wasteland speech is the first major address regarding the visual medium of television.  His warning about the "Vast Wasteland" to television industry leaders was a call for quality.  Today the internet does bring quality but it also brings a vaster wasteland, because even though we live in the visual age, as a society we far from "learning to see". 

To learn to see requires us to listen the same message Newton N. Minnow gave to his industry, but whether we heed that message is entirely a personal choice.  In this paradox wisdom, the wisdom that pertains is to my life.  There is no value to the visual age we live in unless what we learn to see is our own choice and our own way of being. 

The irony of Newton Minnow is that in 1961 he represented one of the best appointments for FCC Chairman and yet last year Donald Trump appointed what may eventually be seen as the worst appointment as FCC Chairman.  How did this happen in an accelerated visual age, where people actually do appreciate the content delivered in this age?

The answer to why we keep repeating history or make poor electoral choices comes down to being blinded by the extra attention span and mental bandwidth that is consumed by visual imagery that is today a vaster wasteland.  The only difference is that we are willing accomplices in the cultivation of media waste.  It is not as if this visual age did not have other skeptics whose warnings have equally not been understood.  That is why I like idea of the "Society of the Spectacle", not for its Marxist ideology but the idea of the "Spectacle" which philosopher Guy Debord warned us about.  Today we all watch the spectacle of the American political system both compiling a massive national debt and an awful President.

How do we embrace this spectacle yet see it when it is pointed out?  Visual smarts should be transforming ourselves by making an effort in learning to see our own behaviour.  Visual consumption has one drawback, our brain is fed with visual images of the behaviour of others.  Our minds are then consumed by images which we may criticize but that is not being visual smart, it is simply reacting to visual image and commenting on it - or worse be polarized into a specific viewpoint.

I benefit from reflective thinking and what I write online is generally reflective, so I serve to comprehend my own level of visual smarts.  Visual smarts is not about explaining stuff to people, the idea of smart is itself an example of how we do not learn to see.  Phones are called smart these days, so are goals - but prefixing or suffixing something as "smart" is only smart if what is being explained as smart is our own being and not the product itself - unless of course we are the product.

While I am beneficiary of reflective practice, it is not a given that I have mastered either critical thinking or at a more poignant and larger level, the skills of creative thinking.  We all have great potential for learning development in all three areas of thinking that I focus upon in my learning pathways.  Yet in terms of creative thinking, I lag even more than I do in terms of critical thinking - and all of this should be helping us individually to see, hear, touch, smell and taste this world.

There are limits to how developed our critical and creative thinking can be - but since all of us are so far off from those limits, the scope to become visually smart is tremendous.  Yet this scope is of no significance unless this is what the individual person wants.  Even Guy Debord filled his mind about what people do rather than what he did, and that is a recipe for dark depression.  Change for whatever it is worth begins with a decision made by us, not our dictates about what others are doing or not doing.  Simply listening to Guy Debord or even Sir Ken Robinson will not make us visually smart :

The constraint in development is the commitment in terms of time reserved and ability to practice creative thinking.  The resources for developing creative thinking are plentiful but we generally assume ourselves as being visually smart, rather than recognize the opportunity to develop. 

These resources in the creative thinking area are vast.  It is simply our own will to seek and apply creative resources and our capacity to follow through with actual practice which is the real determination of how visually smart we can make ourselves.  While I frequently utilize mind maps in my own life, they have not contributed to my own creative thinking ability, they simply reinforce my higher level of reflective thinking ability, but that does not mean that visual tools like mind maps will be used the same way by others. It is the uniqueness of the ways we choose to learn which is our individual prerogative, but the barrier to visual smarts remains our reluctance to learn a skill that is either foreign or relatively new to us.  Mindmaps and visual learning is discussed by Tony Buzan :

At a certain point we will reach our own individual capacity for creativity, critical thinking and reflective thinking.  Creative thinking itself has separate areas of ability such as the emerging field of design thinking.  Instead of jumping ahead and live in admiration mode, to develop our visual smarts the effort required needs participation mode.  The key to visual smarts is not to assume mastery but to watch for creative clues. 

Yet when we are functioning at higher levels of practice then we begin to enter the domain of mastery.  Robert Green provides an overview of mastery but just because we can intellectually talk about mastery does not mean we are becoming anymore visually smart or critically smart or reflectively smart.  We are enamoured by subjects like genius and innovation because we offer each so many quotes, but this is largely a childish parlour game we play that we are not visually smart to rise beyond.   It is good to listen to people like Robert Greene but knowledge is not proof of personal development, it is simply our ability to be rote with our memory.